In the semiconductor industry, devices are fabricated by a number of manufacturing processes producing structures of an ever-decreasing size. Some manufacturing processes, such as plasma etch and plasma clean processes, expose a substrate to a high-speed stream of plasma to etch or clean the substrate. The plasma may be highly corrosive, and may corrode processing chambers and other surfaces that are exposed to the plasma. This corrosion may generate particles, which frequently contaminate the substrate that is being processed, contributing to device defects.
As device geometries shrink, susceptibility to defects increases, and particle contaminant requirements (i.e., on-wafer performance) become more stringent. To minimize particle contamination introduced by plasma etch and/or plasma clean processes, chamber materials have been developed that are resistant to plasmas. Examples of such plasma resistant materials include ceramics composed of Al2O3, AlN, SiC, Y2O3, quartz, and ZrO2. Different ceramics provide different material properties, such as plasma resistance, rigidity, flexural strength, thermal shock resistance, and so on. Also, different ceramics have different material costs. Accordingly, some ceramics have superior plasma resistance, other ceramics have lower costs, and still other ceramics have superior flexural strength and/or thermal shock resistance.